The South Country Quotes

“I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers - as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.”
― Edward Thomas, The South Country

“The moment we recognize an illusion as illusion, it ceases to be illusion and becomes an expression or aspect of reality and experience.”
― Edward Thomas, The South Country

“Yet I think he was not wholly the loser by being unable to think. The eye untroubled by thought sees things like a mirror newly burnished; at night, for example, the musing can see nothing before him but a mist, but if he stops thinking quickly the roads, the walls, the trees become visible. (pp217)”
― Edward Thomas, The South Country

“But it is hard to make anything like a truce between these two incompatible desires, the one for going on and on over the earth, the other that would settle for ever, in one place as in a grave and have nothing to do with change. Suppose a man to receive notice of death, it would be hard to decide whether to walk or sail until the end, seeing no man, or none but strangers; or to sit - alone - and by thinking or not thinking to make the change to come as little as is permitted. (pp 161)”
― Edward Thomas, The South Country

“To envy a man is to misunderstand him or yourself (pp 111).”
― Edward Thomas, The South Country